Advising and deciding together with the patient It is also important because due to the current legality of cannabis-related treatments, doctors cannot prescribe CBD oil, they can only recommend it as a possible treatment. A prescription cannabidiol (CBD) oil is considered an effective anticonvulsant medication. However, more research is needed to determine other benefits and safety of CBD. Very few doctors and specialists prescribe cannabis easily, for a variety of reasons.
Many will simply refer you to a cannabis clinic, or even suggest you buy it at a retail store. Right now, the only health benefit of CBD for which we have scientific evidence is the treatment of epilepsy. The FDA has only approved one CBD product, Epidiolex, a prescription drug used to treat 2 severe and rare forms of childhood epilepsy (Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome). For example, some human clinical trials suggest that CBD could be effective in treating anxiety symptoms, particularly social anxiety, Bonn-Miller said.
Welty recommends that people interested in CBD seek out a doctor who has read about the extract and its possible uses. Since the FDA has not evaluated the proper dosage of CBD products, there are still no clear guidelines for how much CBD is safe to take, whether in pill, oil, or topical form. For example, studies on epilepsy found that there were very clear increases in blood levels of some other anti-epileptic drugs when people took CBD, Welty said. The FDA has not approved any CBD products, except for a drug prescribed to treat rare and severe forms of seizure disorders in children.
Cannabidiol (CBD) is often covered in the media, and you might see it touted as an added boost to your post-workout shake or morning coffee. The usual formulation of CBD is oil, but CBD is also sold as an extract, vaporized liquid and oil-based capsule. And Welty said that the studies that have presented humans for these other uses of CBD have been case reports or studies that did not compare the results with those of a control group that did not use the oil. Despite many claims and testimonies, CBD oil is not an approved treatment for anxiety, says Smita Das, MD, PhD, an addiction psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine at Stanford and medical director of psychiatry at Lyra Health in Burlingame, California.
CBD does not contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient found in marijuana that causes a high. Worse, about 1 in 5 CBD products contained the toxic THC, Bonn-Miller and colleagues found. CBD has been touted for a wide variety of health problems, but the strongest scientific evidence is its effectiveness in treating some of the cruelest childhood epileptic syndromes, such as Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS), which normally do not respond to antiseizure medications. Das says: “Some may learn that cannabis is cheaper than CBD oil and go ahead and use cannabis, putting them at risk for cannabis use disorder.
Many people currently get CBD online without a medical marijuana license, which is legal in most states.
